Bookworm Beat 6/6/21 — the flotsam and jetsam of disturbed times

I attack the media, Critical Race Theory, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Al Jazeera, Hollywood leftists, and more. Plus, I have some cartoons.

My apologies for my low output of late. Part of it is that, truly, there aren’t enough hours in the day. However, another part of it is that I just haven’t known what to say. We live in such bizarre and dangerous times that everything I say ends up sounding weak and fatuous. Nevertheless, while we still have the right to speak out, we’d better use it. Indeed, use or lose it, when “it” refers to our constitutional rights, has never been a more appropriate phrase in America. So, off I go….

The Trump Derangement Syndrome excuse for COVID. At American Thinker, Bonne Bete pulled together all of the instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome (“TDS”)  in Katherine Eban’s Vanity Fair piece about the lab leak theory. Bete had the same reaction I did, which is that it’s an extremely good piece but that the TDS oozing out of it makes it so offputting it’s hard to read. However, hard to read or not, we conservatives have been reading it because the points it makes are so important.

What’s so awful about Eban’s TDS is that it’s not just reflexive and uncontrollable. It’s that she also advances it as a justification for state actors, the media, and the medical establishments to ignore entirely all of the evidence that was already in place from the moment COVID hit our shores. That is, she concedes that the parties responsible for destroying America had the evidence before them. She just argues that they couldn’t be expected to take it seriously because Trump was advancing it.

It’s the, “how could we believe you when you said it was China when we know you’ve been a liar all your life” theory:

And of course, Eban’s excuse, aside from being disgraceful, falls flat on its face when you consider that Trump was right about everything: He was right about the economy, he was right about the Russia hoax being a lie from start to finish, he was right about the way to bring peace to the Middle East, he was right about the effect of killing Soleimani, he was right about COVID, he was right about the Deep State and the media…. Trump wasn’t perfect, no one is, but he was right about more things than everyone of the Democrats, media talking heads, and Deep Staters put together — and he, at least, was motivated by love for this country.

Critical Race Theory is so insane that it takes a comedian to help it make sense. The inimitable JP Sears, with his sweet voice and friendly affect, explains to an imaginary classroom how CRT works in the real world. The worst thing about his shtick is that everything he says about CRT is entirely accurate:

Marin’s leftist virtue signalers raise the gay flag. Across Marin, all of the little municipalities are showing that they’re just incredibly proud of the whole idea of gayness, lesbianness, transgenderness, bisexualness, and so much more by raising the flag. The gay flag, that is. For the whole month.

Let me say that I do not have any sense of gay pride. If I know someone who is gay, I’m not proud of them for that. I might be proud of a person for being a brilliant person, an artist, a hard worker, or a hero who saved many lives (e.g., Mark Bingham, one of the brave souls who saved the Capitol on 9/11), but I’m not proud of anyone for being gay. And nowadays, considering that it’s in to be gay, the notion of there being pride attached to announcing that once is gay is ridiculous.

As Bruce Jenner said, “One thing, and I’ve talked to all my family about running for governor and, to be honest with you, it was easier to come out as trans than as a Republican candidate for governor, it was a lot tougher to sell.” (Although that does give me the idea that we should start having a “Republican pride” flag or maybe a “conservative pride” flag. Of course, the real courage over the past five years has come from flying a Trump flag.)

Anyway, back to Marin county. It turns out that there are a few, a very few, people, who think that maybe it’s a bad idea to fly flags for special interest groups:

The councils in Corte Madera, Novato, Larkspur, Sausalito and Tiburon approved hoisting the rainbow banner on municipal flagpoles.

Corte Madera, Novato, Tiburon and Larkspur also updated their flag policies to require councils to approve or deny requests to fly a particular commemorative flag.

Larkspur, however, was more hesitant than most councils. It voted 4-1 to defer both the flag policy and pride flag decisions at its meeting last month, but ultimately passed both unanimously at its meeting on Wednesday.

Councilman Scot Candell said he is in favor of flying the pride flag, but passing a policy that would allow the council to determine whether it should fly a particular flag on a city-owned flag pole is a “slippery slope.”

“Maybe it’s a pro-Palestinian thing, or a pro-Israeli thing,” Candell said at the meeting on May 25. “I mean, there’s just there’s just so many variations that could put us as a council in a very awkward position of basically voting on community values.”

Candell is on to something. And perhaps it is time to make these places uncomfortable and start asking for offensive or ridiculous flags to be flown.

And by the way, I find it deeply offensive that the federal government is raising the gay flag all over the globe. The only flag the federal government should fly is the American flag.

Oh, and how’s this for a perfect cartoon?

One more thing: I was never hostile to gays until gays became an inordinately powerful political group that is hostile to everything I believe in, separate from sexuality.

This story perfectly demonstrates where CRT leads. You’ve seen the video already — a Hispanic Amazon driver brutally beats down an older white customer who was unhappy about a delayed delivery. When the customer complained, the driver, hip to the ways of CRT, accused her of white privilege. The customer said something along the lines of “You don’t have to be a bitch about it,” only to have the driver punch her repeatedly:

Everyone is acting surprised. I don’t know why anyone is surprised. The 21-year-old woman has been taught that (a) whites are evil and (b) words are violent. From her point of view, she was simply engaged in self-defense against an evil person who had acted violently towards her.

The whole incident is Exhibit A in why CRT needs to be stopped (as an old friend of mine used to say) “instanter, if not sooner.” That poor lady may have been one of the first casualties of CRT but she certainly won’t be the last. This is the inevitable end result and it will soon be normal across America.

And if you want a perfect historic analogy, just think of Hitler’s Brownshirts and Hitler Youth attacking Jews, Gypsies, communists, and all the others they had been taught were inferior and inherently dangerous to the purity of the German people. Moreover, remember that it took only three years for Hitler to completely rewire the Germans to this attitude. He took over Germany in 1933 and, by 1936, anti-Jewish brutality was the norm.

Is Joe Manchin the man who will save America? First, he refused to do away with the filibuster. Now, this:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he will vote against a sweeping election reform bill pushed by his Democrat colleagues, also known as the For The People Act, or S.1, saying forcing it through via the partisan reconciliation process will further deepen divisions.

“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” he wrote in home-state newspaper The Charleston Gazette-Mail.

A clever person (and I can’t remember who it was) wrote to me saying that Manchin should switch parties. Then he won’t be subject to the pressure he’s getting now from fellow Democrats and he’ll put the brakes on the unhinged leftism in the Senate.

And no, I’m not exaggerating about the pressure on him. If you check out Twitchy, you’ll see the madness that erupted from his sensible statement. (And check out Kathy Griffin’s obsessions.)

Al Jazeera gets in on Pallywood. Twitchy caught an Al Jazeera reporter who clearly lied about Israeli troops breaking her hand. I’m not going to copy all the tweets here. Just go to Twitchy and see for yourself. One of the many problems with the pro-Hamas, pro-Islamist, anti-Israel cause is that they always have to lie to make their case.

Leftists always want to use other people’s money. During his new Fox News show, Dan Bongino interviewed Roger Fisk, a white guy who worked for Obama, and who buys into the whole Critical Race Theory thing.

At the end, when Dan asks him about his contribution to reparations, Fisk suddenly says he’s too poor to do so.

They’re always too poor. If all of academia believed the toxic racial garbage it (collectively) is spouting, every private college and university would (a) refuse to admit any white students and, instead, admit only minorities and (b) would turn over endowments, many of which run into the multi-billions of dollars, to poor black communities or BLM. But they don’t. All of these individuals and institutions want taxpayer money transferred to their pet causes. Nothing shows more clearly that this is just a giant leftist con job. It’s about making your money their money.

And as for Fisk, here’s how he describes his business and career:

Roger Fisk, President of New Day Strategy, is a global communications and marketing strategist who played a key behind-the-scenes role in the back-to-back presidential victories of Barack Obama.

Since 2012, Roger Fisk has been applying the tools and lessons from these victories to the challenges of his private sector clients all over the world–from insurance companies in Asia, to European cities bidding to host global sporting events, to Fortune 100 companies looking to rejuvenate their messaging culture.

[snip]

With clients ranging from MIT to Ernst and Young and Microsoft, Roger Fisk shares a surgical set of tools that help brands get the right message to the right customer at the right time so they get the right result. His Master Classes in marketing give clients the competitive edge in the global marketplace where competition for every click and view is intense, and already in 2019 he has shared these lessons with clients in Singapore, the UAE, India and Malaysia.

Fisk adds to this portfolio by moving in front of the camera himself, providing global analysis to SKY TV, FOX NEWS, BBC, Israel’s i24 and Dubai’s Gulf News and more.

I’m betting that Fisk has a very nice upper-middle-class salary. If he has children, they went to private schools and pricy colleges. He drives a high-end car. Yes, that’s all supposition, but I think it’s reasonable to believe that, if Fisk retrenched, he could easily donate $100,000 or more annually to the poor minorities he’s hurt with his unearned privilege. But of course, he doesn’t.

Neither, incidentally, do all those virtue-signaling Hollywood actors. Sure, they promise $1 million to a Marxist front group like BLM, but what they should be doing is remodeling the Southside of Chicago and transferring title to the black residents so that they have an ownership interest in their community; or they should be paying all private school tuition for minority children in a city, or a million (or tens of millions) other things. (Note that Bill Gates isn’t doing any of this either, nor are any other of the leftist race-warrior tech billionaires.)

As far as I know, the only decent star in Hollywood is my beloved (in-joke) Keanu Reeves, and even he doesn’t give away the bulk of his fortune.

A wonderful new political cartoonist. Through my work at American Thinker, I’ve been fortunate to witness the superfast growth of a new political cartoonist. Broc Smith has been so prolific that American Thinker doesn’t have the space to publish all of his wonderful cartoons. I suggested that he start a blog, which he did — Right of Center by Broc Smith. I urge you to check out his work. It’s really good and, in the old days, would be a shoo-in for the editorial pages of a big city paper.

A few random cartoons. Stephen Hayward, in his always-must-see Saturday cartoon round-up (The Week In Pictures), used a lot of cartoons I’d been saving. The ones I have left won’t make a full post so I’ll throw them in here: